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Relative Acceptability of Missing Adjective Forms in Swedish
Abstract
This chapter discusses the implications of an acceptability test designed to evaluate the Swedish native speakers's reluctance to form the neuter gender of certain adjectives such as the defective adjectives. This chapter provides some observations related to the Löwenadler paper. While the paper focused on the certain Swedish adjective forms which are regarded as ungrammatical by most Swedish speakers, the present chapter places emphasis on the actual evaluation of the logically possible yet unacceptable neuter alternatives. To provide a better understanding of the reluctance of speakers to use neuter gender, the chapter provides some additional factors aside from the inflectional process that define the judgements derived from the acceptability test.
... Some previous research has involved the Norwegian, or more frequently the Swedish, defective adjective paradigms (cf. Johansson, 1999Johansson, , 2003Johansson & Torkildsen, 2005;Pettersson, 1990;Ra elsiefen, 2004;Rice, 2007;Fanselow & Féry, 2002;Lowenadler, 2010). While our experiment speci cally uses Norwegian speakers and Norwegian adjectives, it is important to note that there is considerable overlap in defective adjectives between Norwegian and Swedish. ...
... Previous theoretical work (Fanselow & Féry, 2002;Lowenadler, 2010;Ra elsiefen, 2004;Rice, 2007;Pettersson, 1990) suggests phonological, semantic, and frequency factors, and the topic has not been conclusively settled. e speakers of languages that contain paradigmatic gaps somehow have acquired knowledge that these forms are indeed not used and lack alternatives. ...
... ere is a strong tendency for these adjectives to share semantic features relating to internal states or non-observable properties (cf. Johansson, 2003;Johansson & Torkildsen, 2005;Pettersson, 1990;Lowenadler, 2010), such as mental states (e.g., laziness, happiness, and pride). ...
The present volume presents research on language processing and language disorders. Topics range across typical language processing, child developmental language disorders, adult neurodegenerative disorders and neurological bases of typical or impaired brains. The chapters cover a number of linguistic phenomena, including relative clauses, empty categories, determiner phrases and inflectional morphology. Work in this collection uses a variety of experimental methods, both online and offline, such as eye tracking, reaction times, Event Related Potentials, picture selection, sentence elicitation and picture matching tasks. This book will be useful for linguists, speech therapists, and psycholinguists working on the processing of morphosyntax.
... There is a disconnect between the sources used to identify gapstypically, examples are culled from dictionaries or grammars and the goal of studying the individual. However, previous experimental work on gaps has included production and confidence ratings tasks (Albright 2003, Pertsova and Kuznetsova 2015, Sims 2006a, Sims 2009), acceptability judgments (Löwenadler 2010a), and lexical decision tasks (Lukács, Rebrus, and Törkenczy 2010, Taghipour and Monahan 2020, Vea and Johansson 2020. While these mostly examine participant responses in aggregate in order to identify structural predictors of responses (Löwenadler's study is an exception), most establish different patterns of responses for gaps as compared to non-defective words. ...
... Several examples of defectiveness have been identified in which the expected wordform would be phonotactically illicit, including Hungarian -ik verbs (Lukács, Rebrus, and Törkenczy 2010, Rebrus and Törkenczy 2006, Rebrus and Törkenczy 2009, Törkenczy 2002, Norwegian imperatives (Rice 2003, Rice 2005, Rice 2007), Swedish neuter adjectives (Iverson 1981, Lofstedt 2010, Löwenadler 2010a, Löwenadler 2010b, Tagalog verbal -um-infixation (Orgun and Sprouse 1999), definitives in the Atlantic-Congo language Tiene (Orgun and Sprouse 1999), and Turkish passives and first person possessives (Inkelas andOrgun 1995, Ito andHankamer 1989). These phonotactic restrictions take various shapes. ...
Morphological defectiveness is a situation in which an inflected or derived word is expected in a language but no word with that meaning exists. It is thus a kind of absolute ungrammaticality or ineffability. In the context of the productive nature of morphology, gaps in inflectional and derivational paradigms seem anomalous – situations in which the grammar fails. Investigating the absence of a morphological form raises definitional and methodological issues, but the diverse causes of gaps allow insight into various aspects of morphological structure. Structural causes include phonotactic ill‐formedness, indeterminate allomorphy, anti‐allomorphy effects (lexical conservatism), and homophony avoidance, among others. Gaps also can arise in the context of lexicalization, inflectional loss and borrowing. At the same time, structural properties that the defective words in a language have in common often are also shared with non‐defective words. This raises the question of why defectiveness occurs instead of a structural repair or some other gap‐filling form. The frequent inadequacy of structural factors for predicting which words are defective suggests the need for a closer examination of the causes of defectiveness, in particular attention to mechanistic explanation. This includes processes involved in learning and change.
Words that speakers and dictionaries deem to be morphologically defective (and thus unacceptable) are often found in corpora, suggesting a disconnect between judgements about such words and usage of them. This paper explores the hypothesis that social and contextual factors may help explain why defective words are often attested despite speakers' intuitions that they should not be. We carry out a study on French, proposing that some verbs conventionally analysed as defective in this language are not so much examples of ineffable ungrammaticality as they are examples of social stigmatisation. We perform an acceptability judgement task which finds that the acceptability of defective words is inversely correlated with the extent to which participants orient to prescriptivist discourses circulating in French society, and depends also on the emphasis that the task places on taking a prescriptive attitude to language. The hypothesis that speakers' metalinguistic awareness is key to accounting for speakers' felt sense of defectiveness is further substantiated by the fact that acceptability of defective items is inversely proportional to the frequency of their lexeme, suggesting that the amount of evidence speakers have about a lexeme plays an important role in how acceptable the item is perceived to be.
A well-known phenomenon in Swedish is that some adjectives are ‘defective’ in the sense that they are not possible in neuter
gender. In previous explanations, it has usually been argued that the defective forms could be distinguished from non-defective
forms by phonological and/or semantic criteria. Showing that such proposals cannot account for the data, I will argue that
the defective paradigms are caused by a number of phonological constraints which block morphological productivity not only
in defective forms, but also in many nondefective forms. Thus, contrary to what has traditionally been assumed, common patterns
of vowel shortening and dental assimilation in Swedish adjective paradigms are not the result of productivity, but the result
of a type of creative generalization where new formations require a sufficient degree of communicative need in order to be
perceived as grammatical.
KeywordsProductivity-Defectiveness-Transparency-Creativity-Constraints
1. Natural Morphology as represented in the forthcoming volume by Dressler, Mayerthaler, Panagl & Wurzel (1985) came into being about 1977 as an attempt to create a counter-part to Stampean Natural Phonology and to develop and systematize Jakobsonian reflections on morphological universals. In this paper I will present and exemplify some ideas and findings of Natural Morphology, of course from my own specific point of view.(Received January 02 1985)